New title screen for GrandMasterPixel on Android

So after making some mockups, I decided to go ahead with the idea of making a title screen for GrandMasterPixel. I’m not a big fan of superfluous title screens, but this one contains some useful information and navigation buttons so it earns it’s pixels.

Also, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, to the people who have been play testing. I really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to try out the game, even though it is still evolving & a little unpolished at this stage. While I’ve only been given a little bit of feedback so far (* nods to @kelseyhigham *), I’ve seen the pics that a few of you have submitted when I’ve been playing myself. It’s been a great encouragement to keeping banging away at making GrandMasterPixel more playable.

Next on the list is implementing ‘notifications’, so you can easily see when one of your pics has been defeated, or if you have levelled up. And then some optimization of the Arena judging interface, which I don’t think is snappy enough. And then more types of Rankings lists (daily, weekly, all time etc). And then … and then … and then. Lots more to do !

Also, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, to the people who have been play testing. I really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to try out the game, even though it is still evolving and a little unpolished at this stage. While I’ve only been given a little bit of feedback so far (nods to @kelseyhigham), I’ve seen (and judged *mwahhahaha*) the pics that a few of you have submitted when I’ve been playing the game myself. It’s been a great encouragement to keeping banging away at making GrandMasterPixel more playable as a social game. I’ve released a new version (1.0.6), and if everything is working as planned. existing users should get an update notification on their mobile device.

Next on the list is implementing ‘notifications’, so you can easily see when one of your pics has been defeated, or if you have levelled up. And then some optimization of the Arena judging interface, which I don’t think is quite snappy enough. And then more types of Rankings lists (daily, weekly, all time etc). And then … and then … and then. Lots more to do !

8 Responses to “New title screen for GrandMasterPixel on Android”

1. a lot of the pics i’ve submitted have very few or no judgments so i thought that it might be nice if you could hold and received twice as many judging tokens (every half hour instead of hour) but it took twice as many submission credits to submit a pic…so the same number of pics would be submitted, but twice as many pics would get judged

2. would be nice to be able to save a pic to work on later…not submit it, just save it to submit it later…that way you could work on more than just one pic at a time.

3. friends and the ability to message users might also be cool…social network style.

I just started playing last week so i don’t know if these suggestions would help, but these are just some points i’ve notices since i started playing.

Thanks for the feedback Andrew, it’s helpful to hear impressions from new players.

I’ll address you suggestions by number …

1) I’ve been thinking about the best way to speed up the judging cycle, and speeding up the rate of judging token recharge (probably to 1 token every 30 mins) might work. Any rise in the submission cost of pics would also need to be reflected by an increase in initial hitpoints for new pics to keep the pic population stable. One reason why the judging token recharge is so slow is to give people time to focus on ‘quality’ pics, rather than just sheer quantity of pics. It also means that players with limited time to play can compete on a level playing field with kids that may have too much time on their hands :) There was an issue early on when the game started, where we ran out of pics since the death rate (aka judging rate to submission rate) was too high … it’s a fine balance, and I’m being cautious before I make any change so it doesn’t happen again.

One suggestion that I may try is just for one day a week, speeding up judging token recharge and not giving out submission tokens (dubbed “till the death Tuesday” or something). This would allow a cleanout to occur, and if the result was bad for the pic population then the event could be cancelled, without having made and permanent game balance changes,

2) You are not the first to suggest local saving / loading. I think I’d better push that feature up in the priority list.

3) I’m hoping the new favorites feature will help make things more social. At the moment I’m reluctant to implement anything like messaging or comments, simply since it then requires a whole new level of moderation (no surprise that there are some offensive idiots out there who would abuse the feature). GrandMasterPixel is currently ‘self-moderating’ … occasionally people submit pics that may offend someone, somewhere – but if enough players don’t like it, it just gets downvoted and buried quickly. Favorites are a good zero-moderation social feature, they allows a level of interaction without enough detail to allow trolls/idiots to gain any satisfaction.

What I may do is allow players to associate various social accounts (eg Twitter, maybe Facebook, Google profile) to be shown on their pics page. This way if people don’t want to remain anonymous and want to contact eachother, they can always do it via existing social networks.

Phew ! Thanks for that, you’ve given me a few good ideas and a better insight into some things, just by being forced to think about it some more :)

1. so i’m browsing my pics and checking out their fight histories…say i’m on the third page of my pics and i see one with a bunch of new hits…i click that one check it out now i want to go back…so naturally i hit the back button on my phone…but doh! i just went all the way back to the home screen…arg! even if i click on “my home” i go back to the first page of my pics, not the page i was on. this is also anoying while navigating through other people’s pics.

2. you have a good point about all the a-holes out there, facebook/ twitter integration would be cool…especially if you could post ur pics to your profile to share them with people who don’t play the game.

3. i don’t know if this would work or if it would be a good idea, but what if there was a skip button and that got somehow incorporated into your score…1 win 1 loss 1 skip..5 skips and you loose a hitpoint? i just think this might be cool cause i skip pics a lot by hitting the refresh button.

4. how bout a search? then i could look up people i know without having to see one of their pics first.

On issue 1. – yep, this back button behavior kind of breaks Android UI conventions. Originally the idea was that the interface would not be ‘browser-like’ enough for people to think of it as a browser, but that requirement shifted. If I made “back” behave like a the Android Browser’s “back”, when I guess I’d need to add a Menu option to get back to the home screen. Something I’ll think about.

On 3. – Something certainly needs to be done with regards to the refresh (aka ‘skip’) button – I originally left it in there because it helped me with testing. I’ve thought about actually making the fight players are assigned to judge ‘unskippable’ (but ‘refreshable’, in case of network issues), but I’ve found I use it quite often to abstain from judging fights where I just can’t decide. Your idea of incorporating ‘skips’ into the scoring somehow is a good one, although I’d have to be careful to ensure it wasn’t open to abuse (eg, too draining on hitpoints, without costing any judging tokens = pic population collapse).

On 4. – Search is on my feature list, for sure. Even if it starts out as a simple ‘exact artist name search’, it will appear eventually. Search by email has some privacy issues, but in the long term I could consider implementing the “Login via Facebook/Twitter/Google and find my friends that are playing GrandMasterPixel” pattern.

It would be nice if duplicates were rejected and/or caused a level downgrade penalty. See http://www.grandmasterpixel.com/todiefor if you haven’t already… this guy’s drawings show up way too often only because he submits each one about 8 times.

I agree it’s annoying when someone submits the same pic without any modification multiple times (sadly ‘todiefor’ isn’t the only one). It’s pretty lazy. I’ve considered duplicate detection, but when you think about it carefully, it’s a technically tricky problem – I could detect exact duplicates easily, but then ‘dupe spammers’ would just change one pixel and resubmit. So then what would be the threshold for a pic that is ‘the same’ ? Two pixels different, three, four ? There are some interesting pic series where people have made sequential improvements or tweaks to a pic, and you can see how it evolves .. I wouldn’t want to prevent that kind of exploration by an over zealous duplicate detection algorithm. I think this could be a situation where Edward’s Law applies: “You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem” :).

While I don’t think dupe detection is a solution to prevent ‘dupe spammers’, I have considered implementing exact duplicate detection to prevent people accidentally submitting the same pic twice when it looks like the network failed during the submit dialog (this has happened to me at least once).

One feature that could reduce this behavior is if the pic was cleared from the Draw canvas once it was submitted. Dupers would then have to go to some effort to recreate that pic if they wanted to ‘dupe spam’, and I’d wager most would be too lazy to bother. Problem is, eventually I’ll probably implement local save & load … which means it would then be trivial to save, submit, reload, submit again.

This is an issue that I’ll need to ponder for a few weeks – I think there is probably a good, lightweight solution, but sadly I don’t think duplicate detection is the (whole) answer.